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Shows how musical instruments and the sounds they produce are not incidental, but an integral part of music theory.

Many musicians dread music theory: Its rules and diagrams can feel stern and lifeless, far removed from the sounds that make music so thrilling. In this book, Alexander Rehding looks at music theory from a different angle. He argues that the sounds of the instruments on which music theory is demonstrated—starting with the piano in the music classroom—play a much more active role than we usually notice. They are “instruments” in a double sense: musical noisemakers, but also tools in a kind of scientific experiment. Rehding strips these devices down to their sound-generating mechanisms to show us how to read musical instruments for their theoretical content.

Instruments of Music Theory turns our attention to instruments such as multiphonic sirens, tuning forks, Chladni plates, Aeolian harps, and Wheatstone concertinas—these devices generate sounds that call for new ways of listening, measuring, and thinking about music. Bringing together music theory, critical organology, and media theory, this book can be read as a user’s manual for how to put sound back into music theory. Rehding shows us how instruments do not only produce sound—they produce knowledge about music. Through the lens of these new instruments, Instruments of Music Theory recasts fundamental musical ideas such as pitch, harmony, form, and scale from the ground up to give new meaning to the stuff we call music.

Tuning the World tells the unknown story of how the musical pitch A 440 became the global norm.

Now commonly accepted as the point of reference for musicians in the Western world, A 440 hertz only became the standard pitch during an international conference held in 1939. The adoption of this norm was the result of decades of negotiations between countries, involving a diverse group of performers, composers, diplomats, physicists, and sound engineers. Although there is widespread awareness of the variability of musical pitches over time, as attested by the use of lower frequencies to perform early music repertoires, no study has fully explained the invention of our current concert pitch. In this book, Fanny Gribenski draws on a rich variety of previously unexplored archival sources and a unique combination of musicological perspectives, transnational history, and science studies to tell the unknown story of how A 440 became the global norm. Tuning the World demonstrates the aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and political contingencies underlying the construction of one of the most “natural” objects of contemporary musical performance and shows how this century-old effort was ultimately determined by the influence of a few powerful nations.